I regularly do interviews on the radio… here are links to 4 I’ve done for Job Talk America:

10-12-10: “The Simple And Important Steps To Start Blogging To Help You Get A Job”

6-30-10 : “How To Get Noticed Among 40,000 People In Linkedin”

6-23-10: “How To Use Facebook To Get A Job”

6-15-10: “Your Job Search Data Is All Over The Place. Now What Do I Do?“

I like interviews but don’t do them as often as I did when the LinkedIn book first came out.

I hope you enjoy these short interviews

Here’s a great post from Thom Singer about a recent grad in a not-fun job search.  Thom has some good advice (6 points, including 1. Don’t get discouraged, 4. Ask your friends how they found their jobs, 5. Network like your life depends on it… because it does!).

One thing that jumps out at me from this story is this:

I never heard from her again. She did not have business cards, so I had no way of reaching out to her to see if she has made any progress in finding a job.

Do you have a business card?  People WANT TO HELP YOU.  They really do.  Thom just met this person but he was interested in following up.  And Thom is on track to know about 1/2 of the people in the U.S. this decade… wouldn’t he be someone you want in your corner?

She missed out on an opportunity because she wasn’t ready with a business card… it really takes just a few bucks and a few minutes and you can get your own. I get mine from Vistaprint.

College grads need to step up… they are out of the institution where their demands and expectations are artificially driven by professors… it’s time to be a professional.

At the very least get a business card.

(and call on your career center to get some coaching/help)

Yesterday I was on a 45 minute radio show called Job Club Radio.  You can listen to the entire show here.  I think I’m getting bold, or grumpy… I don’t know, you tell me.  It was one of my funner radio interviews

I’m going to speak at the Utah County Job Club in August (8/18).  The meeting is from 8am to 9am, which means I have to … COMMUTE!  Ugh!  It’s about an hour from my house.  I’ll probably  give an updated Career Management 2.0 presentation… gotta think about that one.  Jennifer Armitstead (who interviewed me for Job Club Radio) started this group recently and I’m excited to see it grow.

Information about the Utah County Job Club:

The Utah County Job Club meets every Wednesday at 8am-9am at East Bay Cafe, the Novell Cafeteria. This group is about providing a place where job seekers can connect to support each other and learn about effective job searching. There is no fee to be a part of the group.

Join the LinkedIn Group

Address
1800 South Novell Place
Provo, UT 84606

In other news, I’m looking for other job clubs to speak at this year – if you are around these areas please let me know what you know!

• Dallas – September
• Baltimore & Northern VA – September
• San Diego – October
• Pennsylvannia (around Lancaster) – December

See ya soon?

Sorry about yesterday (no giveaway), I got hung up doing taxes (done) and getting the LinkedIn DVD ready to ship to the replicator (the person who makes duplicates in bulk). I have a giveaway all ready, and it’s really sweet… but you’ll have to wait until next week!

Today I announce the winner of last week’s giveaway… Nick Corcodilos (Ask the Headhunter) chose Queen Schmooze (aka, Mischa Iseman, @QueenSchmooze)).  Here’s what Nick says:

“[Queen Schmooze is] my pick. Why? The Queen suggests the same strategy that’s at the heart of Ask The Headhunter. Job hunting is not about you – it’s about the work an employer needs to have done. And your challenge is not to get a job, it’s to demonstrate to the employer how you’re going to help it achieve its goal to be more profitable. Nice work, Queen Schmooze! You’ll learn more about this approach in your free book, How to Work with Headhunters. I hope you enjoy it!”

Nick Corcodilos
www.asktheheadhunter.com

You can see the original question here, and Queen Schmooze’s response here.  She gets three months of JibberJobber premium AND Nick’s book – not too bad for sharing her thoughts!

Watch the blog on Monday for the next giveaway… I’ll tweet about it at @jasonalba.

I was on a radio show last week where I thought we were going to talk about LinkedIn (for the umpteenth time)… but Liz asked some great questions and the conversation went in a totally different direction.  We spent more time on Career Management than I normally get to… this was a fun interview – spend 30 or so minutes and listen to it here

Liz is a pretty awesome person with a lot of networking advice… you can learn more about her here.

When I started my job search I knew I wouldn’t have to waste time networking.

I was too busy looking for a job to spend time networking.  I didn’t want to take hours each week in the car, spending money to going to events, and schmoozing with people who really had nothing to offer me.

One day I broke down and thought I’d give it a try, but I did it on my own terms.  I really was uncomfortable putting myself out there in front of people, not sure how to network.  And of course, since it was on my own terms, I didn’t get much value out of it (and I guarantee I didn’t give any value to anyone).

My terms included:

• going to the meeting late… heaven forbid I got there early enough to have to talk to people,
• leaving the meeting as soon as the speaker was done… again, no need to talk to people!

Reading Never Eat Alone and Thom Singer’s Some Assembly Required helped change my thoughts about networking… I got excited about those meetings, and changed the way I thought about the attendees.  I started going earlier and stayed until almost everyone was gone.  I started asking for lunches from individuals, and following up in email and on the phone.

Everything changed.  Even, and especially, the results.

At lunch a few days ago I was talking with a local entrepreneur and I had a thought - sometimes you have to be uncomfortable in your networking.

If you look at me now, especially if you don’t want to network, you might think that I’m a networking fool… a crazy networker who does nothing else, and thoroughly enjoys networking.

The truth is, many times I am uncomfortable.

I am not saying we have to be in ethically or morally uncomfortable situations, but many times we are sitting in the network meeting, or in the parking lot before the meeting, or right by our phone before we make *that* call, and we are uncomfortable.  Queasy.  Scared.

I’m going to guess that everyone, even Mr. Networker himself Thom Singer, who has written multiple books on networking, gets uncomfortable sometimes.

But let me encourage you to go through with it – don’t let the discomfort be a show-stopper for you.

Go into that meeting, open your mouth, meet people, and grow your network!  Uncomfortable is OKAY.

A few weeks ago I got an email linking to a story about a guy who did something different to land a job.  You can read the entire story here.

In short, they guy found a job he really wanted.  Instead of applying for it, he decided to:

… [pose] as a comparable employer and posted a comparable job opening online. He asked applicants to send a resume, cover letter and salary their requirement.

He got dozens of “applications” from poor, unsuspecting job-seekers. His little ruse allowed him to gauge his competition, and to identify an appropriate salary range. With this new-found omniscience,  he applied for the job. And guess what… he got it.

This rubbed me wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Sure, I think it’s unethical (well there you go, the red flag).  But here’s the deal – while in a job search it’s easy to get in a position where you would do something you normally wouldn’t do… don’t you think?  I mean, if your ethics were in-any-way shaky, and you were between a rock and a hard spot, maybe you could bend the unwritten rules just once… don’t you think?

I finally figured out why this rubbed me wrong, no matter how desperate you are.

First, it’s wrong. It’s unethical.  You have violated a lot of people’s trust (not in you, directly, but still, trust was violated and you took advantage of unsuspecting people).  That should be reason enough.

If that isn’t, then here’s what I came up with this week:

Second, we don’t need more shady ethics in our world. It destroyed Enron (I think).  I can’t imagine that good ethics has helped GM get to where they are at today.  Ethics are a huge issue in our world – if you are going to stoop this low to land your job, what will you do to make a sale once you got the job?  Where are the boundaries?

Keep moving boundaries and I’m sure to not want to hire you… I can’t have unethical things going on in my business… can I?

Would you like to work for someone who is unethical?  (IT SUCKS, trust me)

Would you like to work at a company with shady ethics?

Then why would you land that job with questionable ethics?

I get the “I have to survive” thing.  Been there.  Working through it.  But lowering your standards should not be acceptable.

Think this is a black-and-white subject?  Read the comments – it’s polarized… unethical behavior is applauded by some and frowned upon by others.

Where do you stand?

One of my favorite premium features in JibberJobber is the Get Contacts List page, which allows you to export your contacts from JibberJobber into various formats, including a .csv file (which opens in Excel).  This is what I use when I send my newsletter to bloggers, or to family/friends, etc.

This allows you to slice and dice your data.  You can see a two minute video here.

I asked my Twitter network how to merge a csv file and a Word document and my California buddy Walt Feigenson was kind enough to create a whole blog post out of it.  You can read his post, How to use Microsoft Excel and Word to send multiple emails, at the link.

Why is this important?  Because it helps you send newsletter-like emails to your contacts.  This is HUGE and something I think every job seeker should do.  How? Read this post on newsletters for job seekers.

What’s more, every PROFESSIONAL should do this, imho.  In The Google Story it talks about how the Google founders sent their friends and family newsletters announcing what they were doing, their projects, etc.  This was a personal newsletter.

Whether you have “the next google” or not, you should reach out to your contacts with a newsletter.

(thanks Walt, for the awesome post)

What do all these things have in common?  The JibberJobber radio show!  Today I spoke with Karen P. Katz, owner of Career Acceleration and blogger who has some terrific thoughts on the job interview, and what we can learn from Obama and McCain in the ultimate job interview.

Karen P. Katz

We started talking about why Obama has the position he has, even though he doesn’t have the credentials McCain has.  I’m not interested in a political discussion, so don’t go there, but think about it… doesn’t it seem that McCain has a lot of the “right things,” according to what a job description of the President of the United States (POTUS) would contain?

As job seekers, do we sometimes look at a job description and think it’s unatttainable, even though we might have done the same stuff somewhere else?  Yup, you guessed it, transferrable skills.  Karen talked a lot about transferrable skills on this one-hour job search radio show.

The Recruiting Animal

We got onto a very interesting point about age discrimination, and how to deal with age discrimination in a job search.  It was cool to have the Recruiting Animal on the show, as he provided a recruiter’s point of view.  What does an older job search candidate do if faced with discrimination in the interview?  We talked about that at length, and some great ideas where thrown around.

That’s all I’m going to tell you – you can listen to the hour long show here

Yesterday I had a wonderful radio show with Susan Whitcomb.  We talked about a lot of cool stuff, and the Recruiting Animal jumped on and added some great info (digging to “why I didn’t get a job if I’m such a smart guy, and so driven??”).  You can download it, or just listen to it online, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/jibberjobber.

Susan’s ending thoughts revolve around what she calls “Providence,” saying that in the end we just can’t lose faith that things will work out.  I truly believe this… can you think of anyone who is completely left out to dry, with no way to survive?  While some people may feel like it, things somehow work out (even if we don’t end up with the boat, and ATV, and other toys that we think we should have).

I’m not going to talk about Providence… you can listen to Susan’s interview here.

I want to talk about what happens to the professional as the job search goes longer and longer.  I went through this myself, and experienced some of the lowest days of my life.  And almost daily I hear from professionals who are in serious pain.

At the beginning of my job search, I knew I was pretty hot.  My credentials were strong, including a Computer Information Systems degree as well as an MBA.  I speak Spanish fluently, my past job titles include general manager, VP, CIO, IT Manager, etc.  I was involved in some very cool projects, and saw significant growth/improvement, etc.

I did not have a problem with feeling good about myself.

Until a few weeks went by… and I was not getting any return phone calls or emails.  I was sitting in my chair, with my laptop, wondering why people weren’t responding to me.  Couldn’t they see how incredible I was, and what I’d add to their company, and why they should hire me????

I started to doubt myself. Was I really that good?  Or maybe I was just in the right place at the right time, and lucked out in the previous part of my career.

I lost self-confidence. If companies weren’t interested in me, even for lesser jobs than I had in the past, maybe I wasn’t worth anything?  Did I go to the wrong school?  Was my employer badmouthing me when called as a reference?  Where my skills just not useful anymore?  Was I the commodity I never should have been?

I compared myself to others, in a really bad way. People who I thought I was better than, but guess what?  They had jobs and paychecks.  If *they* could get work, and I couldn’t, what was wrong with me??

It was easy to lose perspective.  You can read over 200 comments on my Depression Clouds Everything post, which talks about depression in the job search.  You can read why having this happen to you will only prolong your job search in my post about HR and recruiters being able to smell blood a mile away (like a wolf can smell blood of a wounded victim… are you a wounded victim?  HR doesn’t want to bring a wounded victim onboard).

Some things are in your control.  Like what time you get out of bed, what time you shower and get dressed, and how you take care of yourself.  You control what activities you do in your so-called job search.  Is it to sit on the computer and apply online all day, or will you do the right (and hard) stuff like pick up the phone or go out and meet people face-to-face?

One of my mom’s favorite sayings is “this too shall pass.”  Meaning, no matter what we are going through, we’ll get through it.

I KNOW you will get through your job search.  Does it suck?  It’s beyond sucking.  It’s a demoralizing state.  But it’s also a very common state, and many people are in it right now, and many more will be in it soon.  And you’ll be in it again.

But please, please don’t lose faith in yourself.  This job search will pass, and soon enough you’ll find yourself employed, pulling in a paycheck, and okay.  You may not have hit the bottom yet, but you will find that job you are looking for.